Repilian languages/Owl

The Owl language was spoken in 0 AD in the area that later became the Moonshine Crown. It was the proto-language of many others that survived for a few thousand more years.

Phonology

The phonology of Owl, like most related languages, was small, but its grammar was such that one coudl talk about two phonologies: the surface level and the grammatical one. In grammar, MR languages icluding Owl treat only a few hard consonants as proper consonants, and these are what the noun rotos are made of.

Consonants

Surface consonants are

HARD:    t  k  s  p  ṇ
SOFT:    r  ŋ     v  n  m  l  y  ʔ  ʕ  h

The nasals m n only appear in the coda, whereas ṇ behaves as a hard consonant and can appear in all positions, even in clusters like /tṇ/.

Vowels

a  i  u  ə

The schwa is spelled as /e/. The IPA /e/ vowel appears in some MR languages, and must be spelled with a different glyph, because even these languages also have the schwa.

Grammar

All nouns are consonant shells, and they take auxiliary verbs as infixes.

Nouns

All noun roots consist of four consonants, and there is no other information to set them apart. Any root whose surface form appears to have less than four consonants only appears so because the surface form contains a cluster such as /ttt/ which is pronounced as /t:/ rather than /t::/, and even these nouns will still separate the consonants in most of their inflectional forms.

Even the very simplest nouns, like "water", consist of four consonants. However, as above, some noun shells have the same consonant two, three, or even four times in a row, and the surface forms of these words merge the resulting clusters to make them sound as if they have no more than two stuck togther.

Because of the 4-consonant minimum, all words for nouns are quite long. Thus, many concepts are not expressed by nouns. For example, there are no pronouns; all of this is marked on the verb. Inalienable possessions are often not expressed by nouns either but by affixes of manner such as "by hand", "on foot", etc. To form a word for hand, foot, etc in isolation one would then need to put a further affix on this word, and this word would be as long as a 4-consonant noun would, but is not used often.

Consonants shells

Only hard consonants can be part of the shell. In Owl, these constonants were t k s p n. Any other consonant is treated by Owl's grammar as part of the vowel nucleus of the syllable; as well, /n/ has a second form that also occurs as part of the vowel nucleus.

Helper verbs

Nouns must agree with the verb they are the agent of, if there is one. This is done by sticking an infix into the noun; this also can happen when there is no verb in the sentence, and in this case it takes the meaning odf a simple tenseless verb. THis can be called an auxiliary verb. The infixes have very broad meanings mostly, but some are more specific such as "sleep".

Infixes

1. -ev- male
2. -vi- female